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Surprise! We're getting married - right now

It's one thing when you surprise your friends with seemingly impromptu nuptials. It's another thing altogether when you surprise your parents.

Maureen Turner, 36, and Tom Rasmussen, 37, of Lambton, invited friends to a July barbecue and, in the middle of it, announced it was actually a wedding. She’s wearing a cocktail dress but his “tuxedo” is a T-shirt. (ANGELA DAWN PHOTOGRAPHY)

It's one thing when you surprise your friends with seemingly impromptu nuptials. It's another thing altogether when you surprise your parents.

But that was the chance Maureen Turner, 36, and Tom Rasmussen, 37, took in front of unsuspecting friends and family at an annual summer barbecue when they announced their plans to marry – that day.

Rasmussen won't say exactly what Turner's mom called him when he appeared in a blue tuxedo-emblazoned T-shirt to make the announcement, but he laughs when he recounts just how fooled she was.

His dad, on the other hand, had long wagered that the high school sweethearts would seal the deal.

His prediction had seemed a lot less likely 14 years ago when, after dating as seniors in high school and moving in together at Lambton College in Sarnia, the two split, went to separate cities and married other people.

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"We spoke a little bit here and there but not a lot," Turner recalls. "We always knew what was going on in each other's life because we live in a small town. Our parents would see each other at the local grocery store and stuff like that, and they would chat."

Turner, who creates on-air graphics for Rogers SportsCentre, eventually moved back home to Lambton with her daughter. She soon learned that Rasmussen, a technical engineering design software sales consultant, had done the same thing with his two children. Almost 20 years after they had first dated, they were living where they had first met, only doors from each other. Turner invited him to come by for a drink and he accepted. "We just sat there and we talked, and it was like the years had never passed."

Rasmussen felt the same way.

"It was just like stepping back in time."

But with three kids (Turner's daughter Rebecca 4, and Rasmussen's son Ethan, 6, and daughter Eleanor, 9), they tried to take things slowly.

"We sort of introduced the kids to each other and let them start hanging out with each other, but, then it really just sort of snowballed and happened quite quickly," says Turner, laughing.

"You have to understand, every single person in our extended family, every friend that we know, has been waiting for this to happen for about 15 years."

As it turns out, they had planned on marrying last summer. That was until Turner, who thought she had divorced seven years ago, discovered her would-be ex-husband had neglected to file the papers. He was contacted and all was forgiven but it meant delaying the wedding.

And so this summer, when talk turned again to having a barbecue on the July long weekend, the couple began lying to everyone they knew.

They lied to Turner's mom, asking her to babysit the kids but not saying they were going ring and flower shopping; lied to a friend who is a hairdresser; lied to everyone they told to come over to just get something to eat.

Turner's sister knew. She lives in Ottawa and needed a better reason than a barbecue to make the trip. A friend to whom they had let their plans slip last year figured it out.

"He happens to be a DJ," Turner says, "so he just showed up the day of the wedding with a full sound system."

Then there was the cake. They asked a friend to make it for a (non-existent) couple who would be celebrating their first anniversary at the barbecue. (After the wedding was announced the friend made a second tier for them to freeze for their first wedding anniversary.)

The kids got a little warning. They found out the day before and immediately gave their approval.

As Turner recalls: "I brought the rings down to the breakfast table and I opened them up and I said, `Does anybody know what these kind of rings are for?' And Eleanor said, `Those are getting married rings.' We said yes. And then we said, `We're going to have a wedding tomorrow at the barbecue.' They were very excited. Then we swore them to secrecy.

"We said, `You are not allowed to use the words secret, wedding or surprise until Sunday.' They did it. They didn't tell anybody."

Rasmussen says they even asked the officiant to lie. "She told everyone she was a neighbour down the street."

At 4 p.m. on July 4, Rasmussen and his son appeared on the deck outside the house in their T-shirt tuxedos and made an announcement.

"I said, `Hey, everybody, Maureen and I just want to announce that we are going to get married.' Everyone was cheering and saying yea," Rasmussen recalls. "And then I said, `Since you are all here, we are going to do it right now.'

"Half the people kind of laughed at me; the other half didn't really believe me."

Dressed in a blue cocktail dress, with Eleanor and Rebecca dressed in white cotton dresses at her side, Turner appeared and the ceremony began.

The day's quirky start continued when, in lieu of a traditional reading, a friend read Oh, the Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss. Eleanor dedicated a song called "Better Together" by Jack Johnson to her new family.

"I still get teary when I think about it," Turner says, her voice breaking.

Heather Greenwood Davis is a Toronto-based freelancer.

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